[Internet] Online Piracy: A Symptom of Distribution Issues?

Hollywood does not understand what hackers really are

When we talk about online piracy of music, television shows, movies and whatever, more often than not the assumption is that we're talking about a bunch of criminal hacker types living in their basements determined to bring down the global economy or something. Piracy is often equated as "theft" as if everyone who pirates content would have naturally purchased a legal copy had piracy not been an option - another inaccurate assumption.

Let's face it - everyone is guilty of piracy at one point in time or another, including the very studios who claim to be against it. And illegal downloads do not automatically equate to people not willing to pay for legal content either. And I feel this is most especially true outside the US.

While I've stopped buying fake DVDs sold on street corners, I have been known to download stuff from the internet. Fellow geeks in the area freely share copies of movies and shows with one another. Don't deny it - it's all true and we all do it. But it's not because we don't want to give our favorite shows and movie franchises our full geek support from a financial perspective either. More often than not, we can't even get access to these shows through existing channels.

[Comics] Contest of Champions

In the course of going through 14GB worth of Marvel comic book crossovers and epic events, you know you're bound to come across some major duds sooner or later. Let's face it - just because you get most of the Marvel comic book universe in one place doesn't mean you're going to be in for a great ride. Some stories are just...wrong.

Enter the three-issue 1982 class, Contest of Champions, a comic book that tried to bring all the heroes together for a battle on a cosmic level with some, well, pretty original characters. I had never even heard of this story before I started downloading the file and now regret even trying to get through it.

As with many of the major crossovers of the past, the premise behind this tale was rather simplistic. Two semi-cosmic beings - one being the Grandmaster and the other initially a mystery character (later revealed to be Death) decided to use Earth's heroes to settle a sort of challenge. If the Grandmaster wins, it will mean the return of his fellow Elder, the Collector, from the dead. If he loses, then things will remain as is.

12 heroes were chosen to represent each of the beings and were sent to various locations to search for magical tokens. Whichever side won the most tokens would win the challenge.

Despite the somewhat lame excuse for temporarily removing the world's population and isolating all superhumans in some floating arena in orbit around the planet, I felt the story could have accomplished a lot more than it did. However the nature of the challenge - this being the odd token hunt - was done in somewhat poor taste.

Image via Wikipedia What complicated things even more were the highly ridiculous 6 international heroes that they introduced just for this story. I mean come on, Shamrock from Ireland whose only ability was her being very lucky? Collective Man from China who could split into five separate copies of himself (like the old story about the 5 Chinese brothers) and summon a the collective powers and abilities of the entire population of China? Oh man, the writers must have been pretty drunk when they came up with characters like them! Or perhaps they were taking in too much of Talisman's psychedelic mist stuff. Surprisingly enough though, the Collective Man managed to survive as a character even until now. Weird.

While the ending was somehow meant to be smart and sort of ironic, it just came out a bit flat and really didn't have much of an impact. Heck, I actually felt bad that I had even spent some time reading it at all. Drat and double drat.

I now have nothing else to say - it was that bad.

[Comics] The Avengers: Kree-Skrull War

In the course of my cruising the internet, I stumbled across an almost 14Gb torrent for most of the major Marvel cross-overs in the past 30 or so years. Although at the time I had only been looking for a copy of The Infinity Gauntlet, this seemed too tempting not to attempt to download. Thus in the coming weeks, expect to see me review a large number of marvel comic books, if only to keep pace with all the stories I now have access to.

Yes, even the hokey ones.

As a kid, I got into the Marvel trading cards mania that hit the country in general at the time. One of the events they would often document was the original Kree-Skrull war, as documented in The Avengers Vol. 1, issues 89-97 back in the 70's. It seemed like this epic conflict that really made a mark on the Marvel universe and so it seemed extremely fulfilling to the Marvel fanboy in my to finally get to read the story.

The story starts abruptly enough with the Avengers, mainly Vision, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, are trying to capture Captain Marvel (who happened to be a Kree exile) since his very presence and the amount of radiation that he emits from his time in the Negative Zone threatens the Earth. Eventually this led to coming to blows with Ronan the Accuser (also of the Kree) who had somehow usurped the powers of their super-computer of sorts, The Supreme Intelligence and saw the Earth as a potential outpost in their war against the Skrulls.

At the same time, a band of rogue Skrulls left stranded on Earth were also trying to further their plans as led by their leader, Super Skrull. The shape-shifters were also trying to gain control of Earth by taking over the US government. Thus the conflict was joined with the Earth heroes pretty much just caught in the middle of a larger conflict.

You can't imagine how hard it was to write that synopsis.

You have to understand that this story was written in 1971-1972, and thus the tone of the comic book reflects the times. It may seem campy in many ways but when you think about the complexity of the storyline presented here and what they were trying to accomplish, it was a pretty epic story indeed. The war eventually calls into play pretty much a dozen of the various members of the Avengers and of course the two alien races of the Kree and the Skrulls all battling over Earth.

Image via Wikipedia What was great about the tale was how many plot twists they brought the readers through. I mean seriously, even for a veteran comic book reader like myself, the story was hard to predict until the very end and even then I had no idea things were going to wrap up the way they did. Sure, some bits were just stupid like how the Skrull exiles on Earth had been, well, stuck in the form of cows. Still, it was a pretty good story for the most part.

The were also a number of personal conflicts involved like the complex love between Vision and Scarlet Witch or Goliath 2 deciding to quit taking Henry Pym's growing formula in order to stop being a hero. The mania that would later be seen as the fear of Communism presented itself in a different way in the book as the fear of aliens living among humans and in their own way the writers were trying to explore many social concepts through their story.

Given how the current Secret Invasion storyline has become pretty epic in terms of the Marvel Universe, this book becomes all the more important in terms of essential marvel comic book reading in order to better understand some of the origins of the conflict in its more final form as seen in Secret Invasion.

In many ways I've always considered Marvel books to have pretty solid characters but sometimes hokey stories with DC Comics usually having hokey characters but great stories. Early works like this though give me pause and have me questioning whether or not that theory holds true anymore. This was a pretty interesting story, albeit sometimes told in an unconventional way, and worth your time to revisit regardless of your character preferences.

[Comics] Why you should download Comics and how to do it

Why you should download comics:

1. To Preserve the Sanctity of the Comic Book. To the rabid comic book fans, this is really important. Much like your Barbie, G.I. Joe or Transformers toy, the value of the comic book increases as it ages, especially if it belongs to an important series and is a first edition. To not damage your prized comic book, download one instead.
2. To Weed the Good from the Bad. There are many comic books which are not of stellar quality. To know which ones to buy or collect, you should try to get an online copy first.
3. Be updated. Simply curious about what is going on in the Marvel world or the DC world? Download the comics first.
4. No Money. If you are as stingy as me, why buy when you can get it for free?
5. Read Rare Comic Books. Everyone in the net raving about some extremely good old comic book series and you can't find one in your comic store? Don't cry, download.
6. Read Comic Books without the Stigma of Carrying it around. Too ashamed to bring and read your new Countdown #36 at the office? This is the perfect solution: Yes, your e-Comic can be read on your laptop. You can look like you're doing something extremely important when in fact you're actually reading a comic book. Oh yeah, no one will sneer at your comic geekiness either.
   

Interested now? Read on to learn how to download.

How to download:

1. The files you will be downloading will either be .cbr, .cbz or .rar. So, first get yourself a comic book reader. You can download the one I'm using, CDisplay, here. You can also read using ACDSee or other picture viewing programs, but it is much more tedious then CDisplay.
   
2. Search for the comic you want. No, you can't just search for "Superman" or "Batman". You have to specify what you want. The more popular comics such as Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men and so on are usually grouped according to story line, so it is advisable to find out what storyline you want to download. I recommend checking out Amazon which sells these compiled graphic novels as well as comic fan sites such as BDcomics and the forums of That's Just Not Right (You have to be registered for this). Both these sites also provide links to the comics you may want to download. Alternatively, you can just Googlesearch what you're looking for.
3. Search for the downloadable comic. If you chose a comic which is not available through BDcomics or That's Just Not Right, you can try searching through rapidsearch. Warning: the files going out in these 3 sites are sent through the popular file-sharing sites - Rapidshare, Megaupload, Gigasize, etc. So you may have to be familiar with these. Rapidshare is free, but has a limit for free downloads and makes you wait longer the more files you download. Megaupload is free, but to not be burdened by the download slot per country limitation, you'll have to download the Megaupload toolbar, which is free. There is a limit, however to the total volume you can download. The files sent here are usually 100mb and below.
   
4. For more heavy duty download, look for comic torrents. If your desired comic book can't be found in those three sites, you can always look for a torrent. You can do this through isohunt and mininova. In contrast to the previous sites, you don't download per comic or per volume anymore. The torrent files are usually large (over 100 mb), and already complete. If you want to download all the issues of a certain comic series at one go, the torrent search is highly recommended.
   

So, what are you waiting for? Download those comics you've always wanted now.